Dust City by Robert Paul Weston YP FIC WESTON

Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?  Unfortunately, everyone in Dust City is, which means Henry Whelp is one marked canid.  His dad is doing hard time for the double murder of Little Red Riding Hood and her Granny, and everyone assumes murder is just in his blood.  When there's a murder at the St. Remus for Wayward Youth, Henry is the first and only suspect. He hightails it away to the dark alleys of Dust City, a place where fairy dust is real and addictive.  He'll have to find the real killer, find out the truth about what happened to Little Red, and solve the mystery of the missing fairies before he gets the axe.  

Fresh off our Fractured Fairy Tales display, Dust City is a supremely clever mix of magic, gritty hard boiled mystery, and fairy tale.  Henry like most the inhabitants of dust city is an evolved animal.  Wolves, foxes, ravens, and all the animals of Dust City have evolved to walk upright, have hands,and  talk, but they're still second class citizens to hominids. everyone in Dust City uses synthesized fairy dust called Dust that can heal wounds and alter minds. So this is a story about drug addicted animals and murder!  If you've ever read the Non-Disneyfied version of fairy tales, you'd know they're filled with plenty of grisly murder, so a hardboiled fairy tale is actually a perfect fit. A big part of the fun is finding the cleverly re-imagined characters from famous fairy tales. Weston does a great job of laying down a thick level of atmosphere.  He brings the wholly improbable to life and grounds it in a grimy and corrupt city.  Like the teller of tales of old, this book has dark morals, a wicked sense of humor, and is a way to use the fantastic to look at everyday life.  It did take me a couple of chapters to get the hang of how the world worked, but I ended up being glad that Weston revealed things a bit of a time.  It made the story feel more 'real' somehow to not spell out how the animals and magic worked as one big info-dump in the first few pages.  Dust City feels like a real place filled with fascinating, dangerous, and offbeat characters.  Anyone that enjoys fairy tales or new twists on fairy tales will find a lot to love in Dust City.

You can find Dust City in our catalog here.

Kill Me Softly by Sarah Cross YP FIC CROSS

Mira has lived her whole life with secrets. How did her parents die? Why is she prohibited from returning to her birthplace? `Why does she get the feeling everyone she knows is lying to her?  When she finally breaks away and makes it to her home town of Beau Rivage she discovers that more secrets than ever.  She falls quickly for Blue, a man everyone says is dangerous, but she feels like she can’t pull away from him.  Life in Beau Rivage is strange, just like a fairy tale…literally. She soon finds that all the residents of Beau Rivage are fated, cursed to live out legendary fairy tales, and she is beginning think hers has a Grimm ending.

Reimagined fairy tales are the new dystopias, vampires, fallen angels, whatever the big thing this month is!  They are in loads of movies, TV shows, and books, so it can be tough knowing which of the 3,486,794 fairy tale retellings released a month to give your precious time to. Fortunately, Kill Me Softly is something rather special.  It takes the fairy tales before Disney cleaned them up, finds the odd fascination with love and death and blends it into a modern romance. I think the novels twists work pretty well, but if you are familiar with old fairy tales, you’ll know some of the major ones fairly early on.  However, once the book is all about the strangling hand of inexorable fate, then that actually adds its own level of enjoyment.  The main fun is seeing the skewed fairy tales and trying to guess how everything will turn out. Underneath the romance and mystery is a look at the dark and dangerous side of fairy tale love.  I think Cross does a really good job at looking at te relationship between real life abusive relationships and the fairy tale like logic that people trapped in them often use.  This is a great, twisted, dark romance.  I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something unique. 

You can check our catalog for Kill Me Softly here.

Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses by Ron Koertge YP FIC KOERTGE

Whats grimmer than Grimms’ Tales?  A collection of fairy tales skewed and skewered with a modern sensibility and dark, wicked humor.  See the dark side of a princesses’ hyper-sensitivity to peas (a dog lick can cause a scar!), Hansel and Gretel’s vengeance, murders most foul and terrible (and these are committed by the ‘heroes’), and where happy ever after is the worst after of all.

Good news: this is smart, funny, dark satire that looks at all sorts of modern, ancient, and timeless hypocrisies; and the power of storytelling to celebrate, lament, explain, obscure, and change the best and worst of things that cannot be explained and things we wish we could wish away.  Bad news: this excellent and slender volume of wickedly funny verse is almost entirely unintelligible if you don’t know the original fairy tales by heart. Conundrum!  Fortunately we have a solution! You can read the absolutely wonderful Grimms’ tales in Grimms' Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories at call number 398.210943 GRIMM. And they are AWESOME!  They are creepy, dark, and filled with the fear of the unknown that makes for the best horror and the worst sleepless nights.  What’s great is that Koertge gets that and his modern retellings just look at the same fears, insecurities, and longings in the original stories in a modern light.  I especially enjoy the tales where Koertge looks at the primal fascination with danger and death these stories represent.  This is a truly unique read and it isn’t for everyone, but everyone that it is for will be very glad they read it.

You can check our catalog for Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses here.

The Last Dragon by Jane Yolen Illustrated by Rebecca Guay YP FIC YOLEN

All the dragons are gone from the island of May.  So when Tansy and her father discover Dragon’s Bane, an herb that only grows where dragons lie, no one will believe that a dragon still lives.  When Tansy’s father disappears she knows it is the dragon that she is partly responsible for awakening.  As the town’s new healer she must find a way to rally her town and find a true hero that can slay a dragon.  When instead all they can find is a con man, braggart named Lancot she realizes she’ll have to improvise. 

This is a truly lovely book.  Beautifully written, gorgeously illustrated, filled with magic and heart, I cannot recommend it highly enough.  It succeeds magnificently as a straightforward fairy tale with excellent touches or romance and adventure, but it also works on deeper levels.  There’s a wonderful subtext about the role of women in society, about the pressure to become the people are parents want us to be, about the power of imagination in confronting fear and evil, and about the necessity of stories in our world.  The art is just perfect for a fairy tale. Each panel is like a mix between a illustration form a children’s book, a painting, and a modern comic.  It all works together seamlessly.  I especially applaud the character designs, far too many comics resort to clothes and hair to differentiate characters, but Rebecca Guay actually draws character’s with faces...that…look…different!!!  Novel concept I know!  I also thought it was great to have a strong female character, while beautiful, that isn’t defined by her beauty or running around in a ridiculously revealing outfit.  In fact, the character of Lancot is the eye candy, and in fitting with notions of beauty in classic times is drawn as attractive.  This is a treasure of a book and I hope people (yes even dudes) give it a chance and discover it’s magic.  It’s one of the rare comics that shows the potential of visuals to tell a deeper (or at least different) story than text alone can.  Hopefully it will also move people to check out Jane Yolen’s novels which are just brilliant as well.  Which you can read in YP FIC YOLEN.

You can check our catalog for The Last Dragon here.

A Long Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan YP FIC SHEEHAN

Rosalinda Fitzroy is woken from a 62 year slumber by a kiss, but the world she knew is completely changed.  She missed the Dark Times that killed millions and is a world completely changed by technology and aliens walk amongst us.  Maybe the greatest change is that her parents are dead and her inheritance includes control over an interplanetary empire making her the most powerful person on the planet, but Rose just wants to finish high school.  All this is becomes even more difficult when a plastic robot assassin comes to kill her, forcing her to face her past once and for all.

This is a crazy blend of fairy tale, post-dystopia (because the future Rose wakes up in is AFTER the dystopia), and family drama.  What’s crazier is that it all mixes really well.  Rose is beaten down, defeated, self loathing, and terrified.  This makes it hard to like her or want to follow her tale, but if you stick with her you won’t regret it.  As the story progresses and we learn her past, her character makes a lot more sense and becomes a lot more sympathetic. What works best is that Sheehan has built a very interesting future world with danger, romance, and amazing technology, but it’s the human relationships that end up being the most interesting. This is a very promising first novel and I’d love to see what other stories Sheehan has in her.

Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories by Moto Hagio YP FIC HAGIO

From Moto Hagio one of the founders of shojo (manga aimed at girls) comes a career spanning collection of ten of her finest works. From a sci-fi dream of eternally doomed love in A Drunken Dream, a girl that hates her beautiful but mindless conjoined twin that sucks all the life from her in Hanshin: Half God, to a beautiful girl that thinks she’s an iguana in Iguana Girl these tales of love and loss have touched hearts for years and now they are yours.

This is a really brilliant collection, because it allows you to see a history of the best in shojo all in one volume. Hagio’s style and skill changes over the years, but all her tales are beautiful and timeless. Like modern fairy tales, these stories cross across time, langue, and culture. Even though the subject matter goes from realistic to sci-fi to all sorts of other interesting places, the stories and line work of the art is simple and straightforward. My favorite stories are the three mentioned in the summary above and The Willow Tree, a brilliant story told with almost no dialog in very simple half page panels. The twist to this one is sad and touching and made me reread the story immediately. This is an excellent collection of manga for anyone that likes well written, intelligent manga.